Asymmetric keys

[Benguin]

Hi there,

We've been happily using aescrypt for a couple of years, but the time has come to move our security up a little.

We tend to be encrypting things on one platform and decrypting on another, so we've either got passwords in scripts or code (rare) or we are prompting users to type them in, which isn't without problems.

We are probably going to move over to openssl, but it would be nice if we could actually use different passwords for encrypt and decrypt with aescrypt. Save on some of the reworking, and keep the clear benefits aescrypt offers.

Tell me I've missed some obvious and easy way of using the aescrypt tool, please!

Cheers

Benedict Carey

[paulej]

AES Crypt only uses symmetric keys and there are no plans to introduce asymmetric keys. We do want to add a -k parameter to allow reading the key from a file, but that would still be a symmetric key.

I assume by your request that you want to be able to use one key to encrypt and a different key to decrypt. If that's the case, OpenSSL might be a good choice. Here's an article that shows how that can easily be done:

http://www.devco.net/archives/2006/02/1 ... penssl.php

[Benguin]

Yes, many thanks for the prompt and informative response.

We'd already been prototyping a bit with openssl, so thanks for confirming it can actually do what we suspected it could!

Good luck with AESCrypt, it's a great little tool.